UVic Attempts to Engineer Entrepreneurship

Andrew Findlay

| October 8, 2010

Image by: Nik West

New Markets: Student Logan Volkers (right) and professor Ted Darcie are helping UVic created a brand new way for universities to collaborate with industry

As governments spend more on research grants  to Canadian universities, commercialization of that research continues to lag. A pioneering new program at the University of Victoria, with an explicit market focus and formal ties  to the private sector, aims to address the imbalance.

The dusty image of a career academic, unsullied by commercial concerns and beavering away on some esoteric research project, doesn’t exactly get electrical-engineering professor Ted Darcie charged up these days. What does is an innovative program between his employer, the University of Victoria, and Wesley Clover International Corp., an Ottawa-based firm that invests in, starts and grows companies in the high-tech arena. 

The program, launched last fall, is called the Engineering Entrepreneurship@UVic master’s program. Boiled down to its basic constituents, what it proposes may be blasphemous to academic purists yet painfully commonsensical to anybody with an entrepreneurial bone in their body: take a problem or opportunity that consumers or businesses have already identified, then gear research energy toward finding a marketable solution. And the degree to which the program marries market interests with academic pursuits is in a class all its own.  

More: To what degree is corporate money shaping the academic agenda at UBC?

Wesley Clover has not only helped cobble together program funding for UVic; it’s had a hand in designing the curriculum and even in selecting students. The program is crisp and practical: after completing eight months of graduate-level engineering and business coursework under the supervision of program chair Darcie, as well as faculty colleagues Jens Weber and Brock Smith, the four students admitted to the pilot project are now working with Wesley Clover executives to select a high-tech business opportunity identified through the firm’s business channels. The governments of Canada and B.C. clearly think it’s a good idea: they kicked in roughly $2.4 million combined to get the program up and running, while UVic and MITACS, a government-funded program that arranges internships for graduates and post- doctoral fellows, together added another $400,000. At the same time, Wesley Clover has teamed up with the B.C. Innovation Council to form the Alacrity Foundation, with the aim of funding the program into the future without government grants and providing seed money for B.C. startups. As for the students, while they don’t get paid for their work with Wesley Clover, they do receive shares in lieu of salary, with ownership of the project split one-third each to the student team, Wesley Clover and the Alacrity Foundation. If successful, graduates end up with a master’s degree and a stake in a startup that potentially could prove lucrative – or not.  

According to Darcie, instead of letting the market guide technology development, universities too often develop ideas in a vacuum, then try to find homes for them in the marketplace – what he refers to as the not-often-successful technology “push” model. “Having tried that several times,” he says, “I know the probability of success is not very high.”  

Darcie took the lead in developing the program when Wesley Clover execs visited the campus about 1½ years ago. “I  decided to engage with Wesley Clover so we could identify market opportunities,” he says. “We’re applying a pull versus push model for technology, and I don’t think anybody has attempted to partner with a private company to the degree that a  student’s goal will be to become owners in a company.” 

In addition to having tenure at UVic and enough peer-reviewed papers under his belt to stack a small library, the 54-year-old native of Georgetown, Ontario, also has a good deal of real world experience: working as a researcher at AT&T Labs in New Jersey in the mid-’80s (he left in 2003 as director of innovative network technologies). Now Darcie is channelling his energy toward bridging the worlds of academia and entrepreneurship. The move toward a more entrepreneurial and enterprising post-secondary institution is a shift that’s long overdue, according to many observers. As generous as governments have been – in 2007 $4 billion was doled out by federal, provincial and municipal governments in Canada in research grants to universities, up 3.6 per cent from the previous year – the country has a less-than-stellar record when it comes to commercializing the output of this research. The Conference Board of Canada, in a February 2010 report, noted that Canada consistently gets a D grade measured against its OECD competitors on patents filed per million citizens, one imperfect metric that’s used to gauge how well a country transforms knowledge and technology into usable inventions. 

“Canadian industry is not collaborating as well as it could with government and university,” wrote the paper’s authors, in typically understated fashion. 